Wednesday, March 04, 2009

Close Encounters of the Asteroid Kind

This week proved to be "interesting times" Because this week we had a VERY close pass of an asteroid somewhere around 100 feet across. To put that size in perspective, the Tunguska event was thought to be the same size and it leveled hundreds of square miles of forest land.

Just how close is close? The asteroid passed about 60 thousand miles above the Earth. The Moon is 384.4 thousand miles away. Yep, 6 times closer than the moon - only twice the distance of communications satellites and traveling at at very smart pace of 8.82 km/s.

Gizmodo article

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